Search Results: Holocaust

This week, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that although 'some of you will not believe' it, he 'cares more about Palestinians than their leaders do'. He is right - I don't believe him, not least because what he is saying is nothing new. Israel has long been claiming that it only harms Palestinians because Palestinians force them to do it. As well as making Israel sound remarkably like an abusive partner (Why did you have to go and make me hit you?) this is also Dehumanisation 101.

Holocaust survivor Primo Levi wrote If This is a Man to carry out what he saw as the critical task of bearing witness, and he became one of the greatest writers of the 20th century as he continued to bear witness one way and another in later books. Some day, one of Australia's asylum seekers will, like Levi and with the same sense of dread and horror, tell his or her story to ensure that someone bears witness; and to confirm that all of us are implicated.

In the history of the Second World War and the deathly screed of the Final Solution, the Sonderkommando cuts a pitiable figure. These Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and other death camps who were forced to perform the logistics surrounding mass murder - the carting and disposal of dead flesh - though patently victims, were viewed by some as collaborators. Son of Saul provides an immersive and impressionistic extrapolation of this ethical and actual horror.

I arrived in Australia at the ripe old age of five months. I learned Australian values by a process of gentle osmosis. Many Indigenous Australians learned these values in a less gentle fashion. Today, many Australian Jews show a strong loyalty to the world's only Jewish state. Others combine loyalties with other ancestral homelands. Australian Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists and Hindus have similar broadened loyalties. Exactly how such loyalties make them any less Australian beats me.

For many years, historian Gary Foley has drawn attention to the racist past inscribed throughout the infrastructure of Melbourne University. Now, some staff and students are campaigning to rename facilities linked to particularly egregious individuals, such as the Richard Berry building, named after a leading eugenicist who stole the corpses of Indigenous people for research designed to prove the racial superiority of whites. While some accuse the campaigners of politically correct censorship, in fact the past has already been censored, and the campaigners are dragging it back into the light.

In journalism, 'he said, she said' often functions as an evasion. Reporters' loyalty should be to accuracy, which isn't about compromise between extremes. When denialists and climate scientists take diametrically opposed stances, the truth doesn't lie somewhere in the middle. Sometimes, one side's right and the other's just wrong. The same can be said of reporting about the rightwing United Patriots Front. While they deny being fascists, that's what they are, and that's what we should call them.

Invoking Joseph Conrad's story about seagoing doppelgangers, 'The Secret Sharer', Edward Said identified Islamophobia as anti-Semitism's respectable twin. Indeed Israeli PM Netanyahu's description of the Mufti urging Hitler onto greater evil contains an echo of the old anti-Semitic canard of Jews as shadowy manipulators. This trope is central to the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, was a key element in Goebbels' propaganda campaigns, and is now central to contemporary Islamophobia.

Benjamin Netanyahu's historical revisionism last week essentially blaming Palestinians for the Holocaust was much more than just empty rhetoric. Demonising the Palestinians is how he sets the stage for the west's acceptance of the Israeli Occupation: the more he dehumanises them, the more brutality Israel gets away with. The context that gets lost along the way is the link that exists between Palestinian actions and the abysmal living conditions imposed on them by the Occupation.

Banning people from entering countries has become the flavour of the month. Two US citizens, hip-hop artist Chris Brown and anti-abortion advocate Troy Newman, were banned from entering Australia. It is sometimes right to exclude people. But unless the processes are transparent and the need clearly demonstrated, such exclusion has costly consequences for the life of the community. It privileges power over reflection, and suggests character is defined unchangeably by past behaviour.

Fairfax columnist Clem Bastow has raised concerns about the campaign to ban US rapper and convicted woman basher Chris Brown from touring here: 'The use of immigration law to "send a message" is something any feminist should be profoundly uncomfortable with,' she wrote. Well, as a feminist and a mother of two young boys, I welcome the ban. I've come to realise that in the dialogue I have with my sons about violence against women, rhetoric, posturing, and even hypocrisy have their uses.

The British commanders used the Australian troops who landed at Gallipoli as cannon fodder. The Turkish Government is doing something similar with the Australian visitors whom it is welcoming with open arms, in that it is using them to help smother the memory of the Armenian Genocide, which also occurred 100 years ago this week. In connection with Genocide, Pope Francis said recently that ‘concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it’.

Israel is one of the world's developed countries that is attempting to deter asylum seekers from accessing the protection that international refugee law entitles them to. Yet Israel is a state with refugeehood in its roots. Israeli refugee advocates have encouraged a change of policy on the basis of Jewish exile in Egypt as recorded in the Torah.